Tuesday 4 March 2014 11.11 EST
First published on Tuesday 4 March 2014 11.11 EST

The mother of Reeva Steenkamp, the woman shot dead by Oscar Pistorius, has told how the Paralympic athlete failed to acknowledge her when his murder trial began on Monday.

June Steenkamp, whose daughter died at Pistorius's home on Valentine's Day last year, had never met the sportsman before but attended court on Monday in the hope of looking him in the eye.

"I wanted to see him and him to see me," she told ITV News. "But he didn't look at me or anything. He just walked straight and looked ahead."

Steenkamp, who lives in Port Elizabeth in Eastern Cape province, did not attend Pistorius's bail application hearings last year but went to Pretoria for the opening of the trial.

She stared at Pistorius for long moments but he never returned her gaze. He spent most of the day writing notes in the dock and avoiding looking at the public gallery.

"The whole point was he must see me, that I'm there," she said. "I'm her mother and you know, what happened to her was terrible. And I wanted him to see me there, that I am there representing Reeva."

Steenkamp spoke from her guesthouse on Monday night after hearing Pistorius once again insist in court that he had not intended to kill his girlfriend.

He claims he shot four times through a locked toilet door because he thought she was an intruder.

Steenkamp, 67, said she could forgive the "blade runner" for what he had done.

"I'm not a person who hates another person," she said. "One has to forgive otherwise I will sit with all that anger and I don't want it to burn me up. One has to forgive. We'll never forget."

She was not present in court on Tuesday, when Pistorius's composure finally broke as he heard graphic details of Reeva's death. The defence lawyer, Barry Roux, claimed a gunshot wound to the head would have made it impossible for her to scream.

"The person with that brain damage will have no cognitive response," Roux said. "It cannot be. She could not have screamed." Pistorius bowed his head and folded his hands behind his neck, then wiped away tears with a white handkerchief.

The prosecution's second witness, neighbour Estelle van der Merwe, testified that she heard what sounded like an argument early on the morning Reeva was killed.

"From where I was sitting it seemed like two people were having an argument but I couldn't hear the other person's voice," she said through an Afrikaans-language interpreter.